Crack the Spine Issue forty-eight
Crack The Spine Issue Forty-Eight December 18, 2012 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2012 by Crack the Spine
Contents Linda Niehoff Florida Cory Saul I Swear the Stars are Connected Marie Abate The Clock Maury Nicely Wreckers Elena Botts I Sit in Your Window Day and Night Derailed Christina Harrington Heat Lighting Rob Heath Pause and Ask if Really Junk
Linda Niehoff Florida Grandma said lying runs in the family, but Dad didn’t call them lies. “We’ll fly to Florida,” he’d say when sleet pinged the windows at night. “There’s always bright oranges and grapefruit hanging on the trees like little suns.” “Even now?” I’d ask, tucked under blankets not yet warm. “We’ll pick them and walk along the beach. Let the juice drip down our chins.” “I wasn’t blind to the truth,” Grandma would say later as she looked out the window at the shiny black streets and the dark wet night. Then she’d stay up late telling me stories about my grandfather through purple wrinkled lips. Perhaps I should’ve listened, but in my head I walked through crashing waves and caught ropes of fish-smelling seaweed and let the cuffs of my pants get wet in the salty ocean. My grandmother always talked about my grandfather on dark winter nights after Dad had gone to sleep or else he’d yell, “Ma, quit telling her that junk.” And then, “Ruby, go to bed,” as if shouting that through thin walls made him the type of dad who wouldn’t walk away. “It was Susan,” he’d say many years later over the phone when it was just Grandma and me and had been for a long time. “It was when Susan brought Hillary into my office.” As if Susan was the one to blame. I watched while he packed the one black suitcase. There weren’t suits or ties like one of his business trips but t-shirts and shorts and a pair of sandals I’d never seen. I thought of his white legs and the black hairs that sprouted and curled over them. I couldn’t imagine him without his black socks on. “But you promised you’d take me,” I said. “Not her.” He sighed the way he always did whenever Grandma or me said anything about her. Then he hefted the suitcase off the bed and walked down the hall. “Just like his father,” Grandma said to the night window. “Everyone said so the day he was born, but I wouldn’t believe it.” “Ma quit talking like that. It’ll only be for a few days.” Then to me he said, “You have your grandmother.” I looked at her still looking out the dark window, seeing things I couldn’t see. I turned to him. “Hillary?” I said. “What kind of a name is Hillary?”
“I’ll be back soon,” he said and closed the door behind him. But of course he wasn’t. Two weeks later I got a postcard in the mail with “Florida” written in yellow cursive letters over a background painted blue. Inside the letters were drawings of palm trees, cresting waves, and trees with yellow and golden balls of fruit. “They always take them to Florida,” Grandma said and went back to her seat by the window.
Linda Niehoff studied Theatre & Film at the University of Kansas. While still a student her play, Childish Things, was produced by the university. She now lives in a small Kansas town where she enjoys writing and photography. Her stories have been finalists in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award and Short Story Award for New Writers. Most recently she won Honorable Mention in the Kansas Voices Writing Contest.
Cory Saul I Swear the Stars are Connected Sometimes after a fight with Diane I strap the telescope on the saddle and take the horse up the trail to Strike’s Peak. The tripod is uncomfortable under my calf and as we crunch up the slope, the manzanita draw shooting stars in Scarlet’s fur. The frost is gathering in the sand and the brush and as her head bobs Scarlet sends puffs of exhaust from her nostrils that curl and dance like desert dragons. Nights like this, when the air is still, time stops and the world is so quiet that the absence of sound seems manufactured. I don’t know when it happened but somebody decided it wasn’t against the rules to say things you shouldn’t. We know each other’s weak spots. Diane’s is her weight and her cooking and mine is, well, I don’t know but she sure does. We poke and jab with asides just loud enough to hear. Harmless little seeds that ground-cover our thoughts. One of us made it okay to go too far and make it hurt just enough and it was probably me. You can’t blame Diane but I can because it hurts too much to blame me. I suppose it keeps us going though, something perpetual like the spin of the earth that only needs to start to keep going forever. Without the bickering and the chiding we’d be two bored geezers in the middle of a rocky desert, a desert of granite somehow ground down to sand through endless silent years. When we get to the peak I see footprints and hoofprints in the moonlight from when we were here last. Like the moon the desert never moves. The ground sounds crisp as I stab the tripod where it always goes. As I remove the lens cap I smile because I see the moon is just above the horizon and you can always see more of the sky when the lights go out. Through the telescope I can see Mars watching the moon with longing. I can see Pisces arguing with Aquarius about tides. Ursa Major teaches her son how to catch fish right out of cold space and Draco plucks at Lyra but he’s an amateur. I follow a blinking satellite as it follows me. The sky starts to darken. In a few moments the moon is gone and new lights appear in flashes. In the stars I see Diane’s face but the night can’t capture her beauty. I wish she were here so I could point out Mars as he followed the moon into the hills.
We used to come here in the afternoons. We’d hike to the peak together and Scarlet would carry the booze. Under a blanket, against a rock, we’d drink ourselves silly and watch the sunset. You never really notice how fast the sun is moving until it touches those hills. We haven’t done that in years. It’s hard to admit that I had a hand in everything, but I did. With my eye to the telescope I think of a legend from my childhood and hope that I’ll see it tonight. It’s about a Native American woman who lost her husband in a war. She gave up hope in people and happiness and the world so she traveled to the top of a mountain and jumped into the night sky. To this day her body orbits the earth, never decaying, always floating, always watching her home planet with an endless expression that might be guilt.
Cory Saul is a recent graduate of a small private college in San Diego. Now removed from his student-employed position as the school's bathroom newsletter writer, he is suffering an existential crisis. He currently lives and writes in New York City.
Marie Abate The Clock Some nights I see faces blinking at me in the dark–– robin’s blue eyes, heart-shaped lips, pink gums. It always happens afterwards, when we are rubber soft, our mouths full of nothings, when we rock together like a lullaby. Last night could be Billy, and tonight could be Samantha, and this could be our bed with the lumpy mattress; this could be our house with the creaky stairs. When you roll me over I won’t think of them–– their hands clasped around my neck, little baby sighs crying their little baby cries. Instead I soothe you to sleep and we dream into Saturdays.
Soon we will walk out of a rented house in search of milk and biscuits and eggs, The Sun, and a kiss goodbye, and coffee.
Marie Abate is a poet and writer from Baltimore. She completed an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in December 2011. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sewanee Theological Review, The Meadowland Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Urbanite, 20Something Magazine, In Posse Review, Bank-Heavy Press, Loop Stories, Downer Magazine, and the Potomac Review, among other publications. She works as an editor and spends her free time working on Seltzer, a literary magazine based in Baltimore.
Maury Nicely Wreckers A ribbon of blood stole across the horizon as the first of the wreckers stepped out of the grove onto the sand. They scratched out craters in the dunes for the pine knots. The wind swept the smoke down the beach toward the inlet. The sky was slate gray, and though the rain had stopped the wind continued to whip all along the beach. When the boat had failed to arrive as scheduled, the telegraph office had wired every office along the coastline. Word had spread quickly. For a time, the lights from the listing boat could still be seen from the tops of the dunes. She had come a thousand miles across the sea, only to sink fewer than a hundred miles from harbor. Foundering on a shifting bar, she took on water and sank, the lights in the berths sizzling in the salt water as the boat slipped under the waves. Ashore the gray lumps lay along the beach for two hundred yards. Tossed upon the sand at high tide, they lay half buried already. Their skirts had dragged them under. They had been only a few hundred yards from shore when the boat went under. Any closer and they could have touched bottom, walking in to the beach and down the road to the hotel, where they would have been given dry clothes and cups of steaming coffee; bottles would have been uncorked for them, though it was only dawn. Along the edge of the water in the predawn darkness, a figure prowled among the dead. The only sound the wind. He brushed the blue crabs away from a face as he knelt over a drowned girl. Her lips were blue, and her dress flapped in the wind that had not let up. He studied her calves, pale and flattened where they lay splayed upon the sand. He wrenched a silver bangle from the girl’s wrist. The arm flopped back onto the damp sand. He tried but could not slip a gold ring from her finger; the water had filled up the body, and though he dragged her a full five feet it would not pull loose. Later, when the first of the wreckers arrived, pine smudges flickering in the wind, they covered the bodies with sheets. Logs and chunks of driftwood were rolled over the corners to keep the cloths
from blowing away. Sand flies settled on the sheets. There were hundreds of them; they covered everything. The unsocketed finger lay yards away from the rest of the girl, uncovered by the sheets. Even if the wreckers had noticed the mangled hand as they carted the body to the sandy plot that had been dug out in the cemetery, there would have been no reason for anyone to waste time searching for half a finger lost in the sand. By noontime, the tide had drawn the finger back out to sea, where it drifted in the current, pointing back across the sea to the old world.
Maury Nicely lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His work has previously appeared in Prick of the Spindle and Clapboard House.
Elena Botts I Sit in Your Window Day and Night I sit in your window day and night and dream your dreams for you in the half-light because all that you voiced got lodged like starlings struggling against my lip, clawing themselves into my throat. I was left breathless. I forget (what it is like) in the blooming sunlight perhaps even to move. my folds filled with so much silence, I can hardly let it go
Elena Botts Derailed
Derailed, my syllables jammed up in my larnyx in an obscenity of metal, I stand/as I do, solitary on an iron track, thinking of what landscapes the universe creates, interlocked with the soft caves of other eyes, for the box-car moments to travel through.
Elena grew up in Maryland, and currently lives in Northern Virginia. She is still attending school. She likes to run. And write. She's been published in multiple magazines in the past year and is currently working with a small-press editor on a book of poetry titled "a little luminescence."
Christina Harrington Heat Lightning It was the third night in a row where the thermometer rested comfortably at 103 degrees, refusing to budge even a degree or two after the sun had set. So it was the third night in a row that Jane and Abbott, two newly wed and newly unemployed college graduates, had sat awake in the heat. Tonight they even tried to have sex, hoping the afterglow would negate the heat, but after some half hearted kissing and something that would be a lie if it were called heavy petting, the couple gave up. It was just too hot. "We should go for a drive," Abbott said. They owned a single car between the two of them- a rusting Toyota Corolla from 1994. Nothing about the car was modern, including the hand cranked windows and the conspicuous lack of air conditioning. "It'll be better than sweating in these bed sheets all night," Abbott said. After a pause he added: "Again." Jane couldn't argue with that logic. They stumbled into the car and rolled down the windows. Both had to twist and contort to roll the backseat windows down since neither felt like unsticking themselves from the vinyl once they were seated. Abbott drove. Jane rested her head on the side of the door and let the night air rush over her, turning her short hair into a tornado of chaos. She was wearing a thin tank top and every once in a while a burst of air would billow it out, revealing one pink nipple. She hadn't bothered with a bra. Abbott found it difficult to keep his eyes on the road when this happened. They drove in silence for a while until Abbott switched on the radio and found the one station the car could recieve- AM 92.2- a local smooth jazz station. The blue notes floated over the two of them as Abbott took the roads out of town until they were driving down dark streets. "It's funny," Jane said. "I'm sure I know this road, but it looks so strange at night."
Abbott just nodded. He knew where they were, of course, but it felt right to pretend like he didn't. "We could be anywhere," Jane said. The road around them seemed like it was blanketed, that she and Abbott were travelling through a tunnel to an unknown world. "Do you hear that?" Abbott asked after some minutes of jazz. "What?" Abbott slowed the car. "Listen." There seemed to be a tch-tch sound coming from just up ahead along the dark road. The car crawled to a stop and Jane felt the cool drops before she realized what they were from. "It's a sprinkler." Abbott barely took the time to kill the engine before they were both out of the car. They walked barefoot across the cool lawn and held their arms open as the droplets coated their faces and clothing. "We look like Jesus," Abbott whispered and Jane let out a squeal. She dropped to her knees and rolled in the wet grass, before resting on her stomach, her face buried in the ground. Abbott joined her., and breathed the wet earth in. Around them the sticky air remained, and before too long they climbed back in the car and continued to drive. The breeze felt much better on wet skin, but soon enough they were dry again and it felt like their windows were opening into an oven. Abbott made the decision to head back to their apartment. "What was that?" Jane asked and sat upright in her seat. She craned her neck out the window as they drove. "Hear another sprinkler?" "No, I saw something. There!" Abbott pulled the car over and followed her pointing finger to just above a ridge lined with trees.
"I don't see any--" The clouds lit up. "Fireworks?" Jane asked. "At 3 AM?" "Maybe some other people who couldn't sleep." Abbott turned the car and soon they made it to the road that ran across the ridge. No one else was there. He killed the engine and the couple waited in silence for a moment before the sky was lit up again- this time by a brilliant white tree whose branches stretched and broke through the clouds. Abbott had to blink a couple of times to clear the after-image from his vision. "What was that?" Jane whispered. "Heat lightning." Abbott said, whispering as quietly as his wife. "We used to see it all the time when we were kids and playing in the back yard at night when it was too hot to sleep." "So it's going to rain soon, right? Maybe that'll kill this heatwave." "No, heat lightning doesn't mean there's a thunderstorm coming. It's kind of like a cosmic joke. All the signs of rain, but absolutely none to speak of." "Well that’s just shi-" The sky lit up again. No thunder followed, just strike after strike of lightning that wove spider webs through the clouds. They sat in silence for a while and watched the sky. Abbott held Jane's hand and she kissed him on the cheek. Soon enough they couldn't focus on the sky and Abbott drove home quickly while his wife whispered in his ear things that shouldn't be repeated on paper. That night they had the best sleep of their lives and the next night the heatwave broke.
Christina Harrington is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, emphasis in Fiction, at Sarah Lawrence College. She's the Editorial Assistant for Lumina Volume 12and her work has been a finalist at the Hollins University Fiction Contest in 2012. Christina loves reading as much as she loves writing and hopes to someday live in an English cottage.
Rob Heath Pause and Ask if Really Pause and ask if really The poets will change anything? Sure – they have their words to Arrange like shuffled pence. So they can Postulate the magic of a Parisian coffee shop Or a lone footprint – or the conundrum of Two spots of congealing blood on otherwise white bright tiles. And that’s because They became poets when They realised that they Didn’t have it in them to be a great Lover Or jazz musician Or politician Which is why they won’t change anything Not one thing Ever Yet in not changing anything They challenge everything Because their lack of action affords them The voice To speak of opportunities You might yet take.
Rob Heath Junk Used to go to this out of town dealer every once in a while. For a bigger score. Liverpool. They lived in Liverpool and that was 40 miles plus. Went by car – Strikes me as kinda ironic. Back then, when we all lived By benefits and begging, dealing and lies someone always had a car. Nobody ever said I’m strapped for cash – can’t afford the fuel or my cars fucked its failed its MOT or the head gasket’s gone or any of the shit that berates me now. Now that I am middle aged and Employed and Live in my own home and Tick all the fucking boxes I got told to tick When I became me.
Rob Heath - “Forty something project manager in the engineering sector by day and in the very early hours, before work, a writer. Avid reader. Proud family man. Happy. Living with my long term partner. Two great kids. I am a recovered heroin addict who lost a good portion of his twenties to drugs. Having redeemed myself somewhat I am now in the position of being happy enough to try again for the only personnel dream I have ever had, that of being a writer. As a fiction writer and a poet I am influenced by the greats as I see them – Kafka, Dickens, Bret Easton Ellis, Hubert Selby, Cormack McCarthy, William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Phillip Larkin, W H Auden, Adrian Mitchell and most of all – Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Pablo Neruda – people who could paint the inside of your mind with words. I like to think in some small way, I am following in their footsteps, or at least trying to. I have to date won an online short story competition and had several pieces of poetry published in various magazines such as Inclement, Poetry Now, Poetry North West, Bop Dead City, Bare Hands and Gold Dustto name but a few.”
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